My Double Life (2 page)

Well, maybe it was my fault, but still, I refuse to feel guilty about it.

I looked over at Trevor’s head, still bent over his books. So did he like me or Theresa? Maybe his throwing Cheetos at her wasn’t really flirting. After all, I’d throw a lot of stuff at her if I thought I could get away with it. Besides, Trevor was in honors classes and Theresa’s grades were much closer to mid-alphabet. How could he like someone who reveled in her own mediocrity? Then again, if he liked me, why did he always ignore me at lunch?

“He likes you,” Lori said. “You’re smart and gorgeous. For heaven’s sake, you look like Kari Kingsley. How many people can say that?”

“Me and Kari Kingsley.”

“Right. So turn on some of the celebrity charm and go talk to him.”

I raised my eyebrow at her. I wasn’t sure whether she meant to be ironic or not.

You know how they say everyone has a twin somewhere in the world, a person chance has formed to be their mirror image? Mine happens to be rock star Kari Kingsley. Our faces are eerily identical. In all the pictures of her that I’d studied, I’d only been able to see two differences: Her nose was sharper than mine, and she had blond hair. Mine is brown. But even that wasn’t a true difference; her hair is bleached. Natural blondes don’t have our olive-toned skin and dark brown eyes.

I’d think we were twins separated by birth, but Kari Kingsley is twenty-one and I’m eighteen, plus I’m pretty sure my mom would have remembered giving birth to twins and then losing one somewhere along the way.

When Kari’s first album came out and her face popped up everywhere, I thought I was lucky to resemble her. She’s beautiful, confident, and oozes sultriness. But then she opened her mouth and started speaking to reporters.

While walking down the red carpet on the way to the Grammys, a reporter asked her what she was doing to be green. She gave a dazzling smile and replied, “Nothing. I don’t really celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.”

During the MTV awards she put in a plug for the ethical treatment of animals: “It’s so important we all remember that animals are people too.”

Really? How many of us lick ourselves clean?

On
Good Morning America,
while talking about the reasons role models shouldn’t smoke, she said, “Cigarettes can kill you, and that really changes your life.”

I suppose so.

That’s when it became a lot less fun to look like a celebrity. Her gaffes were instantly put on YouTube and half the senior class’s Facebook pages.

Suddenly I was stupid by association.

I looked at Lori and tilted my chin down. “I’m supposed to turn on some of Kari’s celebrity charm? I could tell him I wish I had some pickup lines, but my family doesn’t own a truck.”

She gave my arm a shove. “You know what I mean. Go bat your eyelashes at him.”

I have never batted my eyelashes at anyone. Suddenly I wondered if that was part of the problem. Perhaps Trevor didn’t realize I liked him. I couldn’t blame him for flirting with Theresa if he didn’t think I was interested.

I opened the magazine and looked at the flirting article again. I went over the bullet points in my mind. Maybe they would work. After all, highly trained professionals who understood the male psyche wrote these sorts of articles.

Trevor pushed his chair away from the table and went and stood by the Roman and Greek history section.

Flirting tip number one:
Don’t stay in a group. A guy may feel like he can’t approach you because of your friends.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I stood up and followed him. He didn’t take his eyes off the books in front of him, which made tip number two hard to do:
Gaze at him from head to toe, then flash him your brightest smile.
I decided to go on to tip three:
Smooth a wrinkle from his shirt or playfully tug on a piece of clothing.

I reached over and smoothed out the material on Trevor’s shoulder, which must have startled him. He jumped about two feet.

“Sheesh, Alexia. What are you doing?”

I froze. I couldn’t very well tell him I was flirting with him. “Um . . . you had a bug on your shoulder, a big one. I brushed it off.”

“Oh.” He looked around on the floor to check if anything was crawling away and took a tentative step backward. “These books have been sitting here so long they probably have spider colonies living in the bindings.”

Tip number four:
Compliment him.

“Well, your shirt is really nice, so you can’t blame the spiders for wanting a closer look.”

He peered over his shoulder at the back of his shirt. “What? Are there more on me?”

Why was this not working? I went on to tip five:
Make and maintain eye contact
. I also flashed him my brightest smile since he hadn’t seen it while I did tip number two. “No, of course not. There was only that one bug, and it’s gone.”

He met my gaze, but instead of smiling back, he narrowed his eyes. “Then why are you staring at me?”

“I’m not staring at you.”

“You are too.”

Okay, forget the tips. Tips apparently didn’t work with the guys in my school. I held up one hand as though taking an oath. “I don’t see any more bugs.”

It occurred to me in a moment of brilliance that I didn’t need that article. I already knew what sort of flirting Trevor noticed. All I had to do was copy Theresa’s body language—and I’d seen her in action for years.

Theresa has thick blond hair, which she uses to swish lesser mortals into submission. I have seen her hypnotize guys by merely running her fingers through it. She also leans up against lockers in this seductive way with one elbow on the wall and her hand intertwined in her hair, which makes her look like she’s posing for a fashion shoot. Then she half whispers things to whichever guy she’s talking to so he has to lean in close to hear her.

I tossed my hair off my shoulder, which Trevor didn’t see because he was examining the shelf in front of him, taking a book off slowly, and turning it in his hands to make sure nothing jumped out at him.

“So, Trevor . . .” I hadn’t wanted to bring up the dance out of the blue, but I didn’t know how to segue from bugs to dating and I couldn’t prolong this conversation any longer. It was better just to do it and get it over with. “Have you been asked to the Sadie Hawkins?”

He looked over at me, really seeing me for the first time. His voice sounded hesitant. “No.” Hesitant was bad, but then his voice returned to normal and he shrugged. “Well, not yet.”

I put one hand on the bookshelf, leaning against it. I couldn’t duplicate Theresa’s one-elbow pose, but at least I could borrow some of her nonchalance. “Do you want to go with me?”

As it turns out, you shouldn’t lean seductively against bookcases. Half a dozen books pushed through and went flying off the shelf into the next aisle. Somebody called out, “Hey, watch it!”

“Sorry,” I called back.

I hoped I hadn’t hurt whoever was on the other side of the bookcase—which would have been my luck: I’d go down in history as the first girl from Morgantown High who induced casualties while flirting.

I turned back to Trevor, but he seemed more interested in the hole I’d created on the shelf than in answering my question. I peered through it to see what he was looking at.

Two guys stood with their backs to the bookcase. No one seemed to be hurt. They were already ignoring the books on the floor. Next to them was Hector.

I recognized Rob Wells’s voice when he spoke. He was one of the popular guys and didn’t usually talk to people as far out of his realm as Hector was. “The thing about American girls,” Rob said, “is they expect you to be forward. You should stand really close and touch them when you want to get their attention.”

“Yeah,” Jeff Savage said. He was Theresa’s ex-boyfriend and the fullback on the football team. “Call them five or six times a night to show them you want to be friends.”

“Stop by their house unexpectedly a lot,” Rob said. “And if a girl calls you a stalker, that means she likes you.”

Suddenly this explained a lot about Hector’s odd behavior.

I didn’t really think about what I did next. As hard as I could, I shoved more books forward. They slammed into the guys with a terrific thud.

I leaned forward onto the now mostly empty shelf. “Did those hit you? I’m so sorry. I get accident-prone when I hear guys telling random people to stalk me.”

Rob and Jeff laughed and took off. Hector followed after them, blushing. The librarian came up behind me, her voice a mixture of alarm and anger. “What happened here?”

“Accident,” I said. “I think this shelf is unstable.”

The librarian was not nearly as gullible as Hector. Not only did I have to pick up the books, I had to go see Mrs. Callahan, the principal. She lectured me about respect for school property, and then gave me after-school detention.

“You’re one of the best students in this school,” she told me. “I expect more out of you.”

That stung.

I missed the rest of world history, so I went to my locker, got my homework, and brooded all through detention. I kept wondering what Trevor would have said to me if I hadn’t emptied the bookcase. He’d left the scene of the crime as soon as the librarian had come over to yell at me. Had I ruined my chances with him? I wasn’t even sure whether he’d heard the things Rob and Jeff said to Hector. In which case, I’d looked completely psychotic asking him to the dance and then pushing a row of books off the shelf. He probably thought our date would consist of me checking in with my invisible friends and telling him about my past life as a unicorn.

What I didn’t worry about was Theresa’s reaction to my asking Trevor. Which, looking back, is what I should have thought about.

News travels fast by text.

I don’t know exactly when Theresa got ahold of that picture the yearbook staff had taken of me—the one where I stood by the Morgantown High School sign, posing with Lori in our National Honor Society T-shirts. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been while I sat in detention.

In the photo, I held up a calculus book while Lori wielded a calculator with more buttons than a computer keyboard. Both of us were trying to look ditzy. Visual irony. It’s geek humor.

Theresa cropped out Lori and put the picture of me on her blog with lots of brilliant commentary. My favorite was:
Any idiot can hold a calculuss book—and here’s the proof!!!!!!!!!!
Of course, it might have been more effective if she’d spelled
calculus
right. Or if she’d used fewer exclamation marks. Really, all of them lined up like that just gave the reader the impression they were about to do the punctuation version of a Rockettes-like dance number.

But I can’t blame Theresa for what happened after that. Not even I imagined the photo would go viral or how it would change my life.

CHAPTER 2

The next day I didn’t see Trevor until physics class. I expected him to turn around at his desk and talk to me, tell me his answer about the dance. Maybe even rib me about the fall of the Roman Empire books. But he didn’t look at me. So was that a no as far as Sadie Hawkins was concerned? Didn’t I deserve an official answer? In the mayhem of the library, could he have possibly forgotten that I’d asked him?

When class ended, I leaned over my desk and tapped him with my pencil. “Hey, Trevor,” I said, keeping my voice light. “I was too busy flinging books at people yesterday to hear your answer about the dance. Did you want to go or not?”

He scooped his books off the desk, his expression guarded. “Oh, that.” For a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he gave a really slow “su-u-u-re,” as though he might talk himself out of it sometime during the answer.

“Great,” I said. I didn’t mean it.

Clearly his excitement level about our date ranked somewhere near being swarmed by hungry mosquitoes. And now I was not only going to have to pay for this date, I would have to endure his lack of enthusiasm during it. I smiled at him, said I’d give him the details later, then spent the rest of the day wishing I’d never asked him.

Lori came over that night to cheer me up. She flipped through my closet deciding what I should wear to the dance. “So Trevor has reservations about going—that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you. Maybe he’s worried that dating will put your friendship in jeopardy.”

I sat on my bed watching her and didn’t answer. What had put our friendship in jeopardy was his pained answer.

Lori said, “Maybe he’s nervous about taking things to the next level.”

The next level. As though dating were a computer game.

“Maybe he was hoping someone else would ask him,” I said.

Lori reached the end of my closet. She slid the door closed with a thud. “I think you need to go shopping and buy something new. Something really stunning.”

“Like that’s going to make a difference.”

“It will. It’s nature’s way of attracting a mate. Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails, women have the mall.” She made a sweeping motion in my direction. “It’s time you wow him with some style.”

Which is how I ended up wandering around the mall for the next week, looking for wow. As it turns out, wow is really expensive.

Mostly I was just overwhelmed by all the choices. I didn’t know which textures went together or how to accessorize. I’d spent my life wearing blue jeans and T-shirts.

Finally I put together an outfit that didn’t cost a lot. I still had to buy dinner, tickets, and pictures. I also splurged on some new stuff to wear to school. I shouldn’t have. My college fund was already bleak, but every day that Trevor flirted with me in physics then ignored me at lunch sent me right back to the mall, looking for wow.

Theresa was pointedly nasty to me whenever she saw me, and I’d already found out about the picture she’d put on the Internet. So when the phone rang one afternoon and a professional-sounding woman’s voice said, “Hello, may I speak to Alexia Garcia?” I had my suspicions.